Comments on: Featured designer: Nod Young

By: Micah

Micah — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:46:28 +0000

I don’t, I keep wanting to scan them in… You can see some examples, not great, from the Linglong magazine scans:

http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/dkv/app/linglong/saxon?source=ling_mets/ling1934_138_mets.xml&style=styles/ling_xsl_38_1.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes
http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/dkv/app/linglong/saxon?source=ling_mets/ling1934_138_mets.xml&style=styles/ling_xsl_61_1.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes
http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/dkv/app/linglong/saxon?source=ling_mets/ling1934_138_mets.xml&style=styles/ling_xsl_23_1.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes
http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/dkv/app/linglong/saxon?source=ling_mets/ling1934_138_mets.xml&style=styles/ling_xsl_27_1.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes
http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/dkv/app/linglong/saxon?source=ling_mets/ling1937_284_mets.xml&style=styles/ling_xsl_43_1.xsl&clear-stylesheet-cache=yes

Of course, if I lived back then I may have complained that all art-deco fonts looked alike!

By: zhwj

zhwj — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:42:25 +0000

If you do a Baidu image search for 配书影, you’ll find a few collections of 20s and 30s novels (Xu Zhimo, Zhang Ziping, and various editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther), some of which have interesting typographic design. Nothing this sophisticated, but one or two are quite striking.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 03:36:36 +0000

Yeah, it is and will be interesting to watch his typography designs evolve over time.

As for my comment about Chinese characters and English letters: I was thinking about legibility. Even with Nod’s work, sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what the characters are if I don’t look at the answer below (so to speak).

You don’t happen to have a link to the said 20th century Shanghai typography?

By: Micah

Micah — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:53:41 +0000

Wow, the Flickr link is something to see. As an amatuer typography fan, I’m very impressed by what he’s doing, stylizing characters like that. I don’t think your comment about Chinese text as vector typography is fair, though. If you look at publications from early 20th century Shanghai you’ll see some amazing creativity with fonts, like what Nod is doing but without the assistance of computers. You could just as well say (and again, wrongly) that with only 26 letters the amount of creativity that you can express in Western roman letters with type is very limited.